Argentina has been a leader among developing countries in restructuring its banking sector. The authors analyze the performance of those banks before and after privatization and estimate fiscal savings associated with privatizingArgentina's banks rather than keeping them public and later...

This paper assesses the effect of institutional quality on research and development (R&D) expenditures in developing countries. The paper finds that the risk of expropriation and the rule of law are correlated with R&D expenditures. Since both institutional variables increase as institutional...

In recent years, foreign bank participation has increased tremendously in several developing countries. In Argentina, Chile, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, for example, more than fifty percent of banking assets are now in foreign-controlled banks. In Asia, Africa, The Middle East, and...

In 1989 the government of Guinea enacted far-reaching reform of its water sector, which had been dominated by a poorly run public agency. The government signed a lease contract for operations and maintenance with a private operator, making a separate public enterprise responsible for ownershipof...

Although theoretical models make distinct predictions about the relationship between financial sector development and income inequality, little empirical research has been conducted to compare their relative explanatory power. The authors examine the relation between financial intermediary...

Infrastructure industries-including telecommunications, electricity, water, and gas-underwent massive structural changes in the 1990s. During that decade, hundreds of privatization transactions valued at billions of dollars were completed in these sectors in developing and transition economies....

Compared with other urban water systems in West Africa, the water supply system in Abidjan performs very well. Documenting the recent history of that system, the authors try to answer three questions: What motivated reform in a system that was already performing well? How and why did the reform...

Based on a comprehensive worldwide firm survey, this paper looks at how the business environment and economic agglomeration affect job creation, holding constant conventional determinants of firm growth, such as firm ownership, size, and age. The analysis finds that economic agglomeration is...

Both consumers and the government benefited from reform of the water system in Conakry, Guinea, whose deterioration since independence had become critical by the mid-1980s. Less than 40 percent of Conakry's population had access to piped water - low even by regional standards - and service was...

This paper introduces a large new cross-country database on political institutions: the Database on Political Institutions (DPI). The authors summarize key variables (many of them new), compare this data set with others, and explore the range of issues for which the data should prove invaluable....